Informal Releases

I've decided to start a lightweight process I call "Informal Releases" which can be made quickly and which leverage the existing install-from-workspace script. However, you don't have to use Subversion to get such a release. You just download a zip file.

Making such a release is much less work for me than an official one, so I expect to make 1 - 4 of these per month. They don't replace the future official releases such as Cobra 0.9, 0.9.1, 1.0, etc. But they do give you early access to new features.

This is for folks are not comfortable installing Cobra out of a Subversion workspace. It's easy enough to do, but users may prefer to download a hand-picked snapshot instead.

Another route could have been to fully automate the build of a nightly package, but then you don't know if you're downloading a stable package when it's blindly made at the same time every day. In contrast, I'll cut an informal release when I'm fairly confident that the Cobra source repository is stable and has something worthwhile to offer over the last one.

You can, of course, continue to use a Subversion workspace.

There is a discussion thread on this topic which includes the link to Cobra 2009-03-01.

Cobra January 2009 Update

January's work was all about refinements. Fixes, better error messages, more docs, etc. Check out the Cobra January 2009 Update for more information. Or dive in now by getting the latest and exploring the docs and the wiki.

Cobra December 2008 Update

Cobra now supports extension methods on generic types, along with several refinements to the language and libraries. Check out the Cobra December 2008 Update for more information.

Cobra November 2008 Update

Cobra now has closures, streams, generic method constraints and more. Check out the Cobra November 2008 Update for more information.

Webware for Python 1.0

Christoph Zwerschke has just announced:

The historic Webware for Python version 1.0 has finally been released. It runs with all Python versions from 2.0 to 2.6.

A lot of bugs have been fixed, and a few small improvements and changes have been made since the last release. See the release notes for WebKit, MiddleKit, TaskKit, CGIWrapper and DBUtils for details.

Webware for Python is a suite of Python packages and tools for developing object-oriented, web-based applications. The suite uses well known design patterns and includes a fast Application Server, Servlets, Python Server Pages (PSP), Object-Relational Mapping, Task Scheduling, Session Management, and many other features. Webware is very modular and easily extended.

Webware for Python is well proven and platform-independent. It is compatible with multiple web servers, database servers and operating systems.

DBUtils is a suite of tools providing solid, persistent and pooled connections to a database that can be used in all kinds of multi-threaded environments like Webware for Python or other web application servers. The suite supports DB-API 2 compliant database interfaces and the classic PyGreSQL interface.

Check out the Webware for Python home page at http://www.w4py.org.

I was the original author and founder of this open source project back in 2000. Over the years we attracted several contributors and many users. Ultimately, I left and turned to Cobra. Chris took over the Webware project and has done a smash up job supporting users and improving the code base. I still use Webware on multiple projects that date back to the early 2000's and I'd use it again on any Python project.

Congratulations to Chris and the Webware community!

Cobra October Update

Cobra has a new "install-from-workspace" script that is quite handy, and I've posted a Cobra October Update in the discussion forums.

SoCal Piggies Meeting Tonight

I'll be attending the SoCal Piggies Meeting tonight at Disney Animation Studios in Burbank, CA (Los Angeles area).

Tonight's agenda:

Michał Kwiatkowski: "Automatic generation of unit tests with Pythoscope"

Joe Shochet (lead game designer and programmer on Disney's Toontown Online): "How we use Python in Toontown"

See http://socal-piggies.org/